Monday, June 2, 2014

Getting into the groove of things

The week has passed by much faster than I think most of us anticipated. It feels like just yesterday most of us were getting down the basics on how to learn to scale sites to grid paper as well as changing our minds from the Standard System to the Metric System.

A week later we have now become pros at understanding how to convert our paces to a simple mathematical equation that converts them to meters.

However besides the technological processes it feels as if we have grown close to all the members in the field school in such a short matter of time.

Perhaps it's our mutual feelings towards getting up at six in the morning, or becoming accustomed to working in such hot climates that we have a mutual hatred of the sun and a newfound appreciation of shade and the wind; whatever the reason it can be rest assured that everyone surrounding you in every minute of the day is willing to take a few minutes to help you apply a bit of sunscreen so you don't burn to a crisp.

We have become experts at digging up pits and understanding the importance of keeping our units leveled as well as keeping note of every detail from soil color changes to noting the little rocks sticking out of the walls of your unit.

Compared to the first day to now day seven of working on the field I feel as if we've finally gotten into the groove of things and are only going to become much more efficient in our digs.

Even cooler to me is how quickly my group and I have been able to identify the differences between natural rocks and flint compared to Hopewell worked items.

While I can say we've found mostly a ton of fire-cracked rock and a few couple items here and there of bladelet pieces I am hopeful that our search and hard work will only lead to a great find. We've had a couple so far, one pit even found Mica!

My group that has been assigned to a historic feature picked up by Doc and Paco's friend Jared's magnetometry, has been pretty lucky to have been able to expose the feature and identify that what we thought was an old sugar mill is actually a brick kiln…and boy is there a LOT of brick. For now though we will continue on our digs in the morning and enjoying the campfire bonding at night.

DeeAnne Wymer, professor of anthropology, and a group of Bloomsburg University students hit the road each spring in mid-May to spend four weeks in southern Ohio digging at a Hopewell habitation site. The archeological field school experience enables student teams to rely on new imaging technologies to uncover another living site of the Mound Builders from 2,000 years ago.